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1

Hello is there any advice out there on running a personal wiki SW suite for Open Suse 11.2. My primary purpose is to run a personal knowledge management system. I am a very non-technical user. Also I am looking for something that is run locally on the computer as opposed to a web-based solution. Maybe in the longrun I would like to open up the personal wiki and collaborate with other selected users for certain pages. I see there is MediaWiki and Zim packages available already on YAST. I have tried to install both. Some observations about Zim, I havn’t experimented much with it but it seems to be not exactly what I am looking for as for. Will post an update when I give it a proper test. I also installed MediaWiki through YAST it seemed to download all the packages properly but I am unable to find the SW on my computer. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Rgds,

adsum01nl

2

Hi
MediaWiki is a fully fledged system and runs with apache web server.
Have a look here;

–
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SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.27.39-0.3-default
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3

Only an answer to a detail of your questions. When you go to YaST > Software > Softwrae Management and there you sreach and select a package (like you did when you installed it), you can then use one of the tabs at lower right to display all the files that came with the install. That may give a clue about where the main executable is and if there is documentation (man pages and or more) with it.

4

MediaWiki, as MalcolmLewis points out, requires a fully fledged server to be running.

MoinMoin has an inbuilt python server, and is therefore the easier option. It’s still powerful (Debian and Ubuntu run their wikis on it, among others), but phenomenally easy to set up.

You literally download a tarball, extract it somewhere (I put it in /etc), run a python script ‘python wikiserver.py’, then point your browser at ‘http://localhost:8080/’, and voila, you have a wiki. I made a desktop icon to run a script to start the wikiserver for convenience.

I’ve been playing with it quite a lot (making a wiki for notes for my degree), so can probably talk you through any problems you may have - although I’m running 1.8, and the current version is 1.9, so there may be differences.

Nevertheless - highly recommended.

DesktopEdition - MoinMoin

[Note - I don’t mean to suggest that setting up an Apache server is tremendously difficult - I’ve never tried. But I sincerely doubt it’s this easy. ;)]

5

Hi Confuseling,

MoinMoin sounds like an interesting program. Just a question as I am a new Linux user: how do I run a Python script? -> directly from the terminal?

Rgds,

Nick

6

[correction to the above - I put it in /opt, not /etc]

Python is available on any given Linux (someone will come along now and find a Linux without it just to spite me - but you get my point ;)).

There’s an outside chance you need to install it, but I imagine it’s on the basic SUSE install - can’t remember.

You then type ‘python script_name.py’ in a terminal, in this case ‘python wikiserver.py’, if you’re in your MoinMoin directory, to run it. Or, if you’re as lazy as I am, you make a script (mine’s called ‘Start.wikiserver’) in your ~/Desktop folder, which says


#!/bin/sh
python /opt/MoinMoin/wikiserver.py

Then make it executable


chmod +x ~/Desktop/Start.wikiserver

Then when you click on it in gnome and select ‘run in terminal’, you should have a terminal showing the server’s output (useful for tracking down errors), and which you can shut to shut down the server to save resources - not that it’s heavy on resources… I only see it on ‘top’ when I’m actually changing pages.

The steps to get it to run from a launcher in konsole in KDE are marginally more convoluted as I remember… Haven’t got around to doing that again since installation of 11.2 KDE SUSE. But if you’re running KDE I can figure it out - I need to do so anyway.

7

Hi Confuseling,
Yes I am running KDE.And yes I see from YAST that Python is already installed on my machine. Please keep in mind I have no experience with coding or scripting whatsoever. If you can give a very simple explanation it would be great, such as how to create a script etc. According to your above explanation I opened up Konsole and typed ‘python script_name.py’ this returned the msg: No such file or directory. Just so we are not assuming anything, when I extracted the tarball I simply created a folder in my Home folder and extracted it there. It seems that it was all extracted successfully. Sorry for this but I am a newbe here…

Rgds,

adsum01nl

8

No worries. :slight_smile:

‘script_name.py’ was just an example.

So if you open a terminal, and type ‘ls’, it’ll give you a list of your files and directories in your home directory. Use ‘cd’ to navigate to where you’ve extracted MoinMoin. Type ‘ls’ again, you should see a file called ‘wikiserver.py’. Then just type ‘python wikiserver.py’, and it should run… If it doesn’t, there may have been a problem with the way you extracted it, but we can fix that…

Obviously, you can cut out the middle step once you’re sure where it is… If it’s in /home/nick/MoinMoin, you’d just type ‘python /home/nick/MoinMoin/wikiserver.py’, or even just ‘python ~/MoinMoin/wikiserver.py’

9

Hi thanks for the reply! After some experimenting I was able to run the Konsole from the directory that I extracted it to. So everything seems to be extracted in proper order. Now in regards to your tip on making an executable short-cut for running the python database/MoinMoin…:wink:

10

Right, well if you just want it to run, you can do it the above way - but really you need the output in a terminal. This is a clumsy, indirect way to do it, and there is no doubt a better one. Learn scripting from me, and You Will Fail At Scripting Forever. That warning said;

Unlock widgets (click the cashew thing).

Right click on your folder view, and create a new text file. Call it ‘Start.wikiserver’, or whatever is your preference. Right click on it, and edit it in kwrite. Add the following;


#!/bin/sh 
konsole -e '~/Scripts/MoinMoin.sh'

Now open a konsole, and make yourself a scripts directory


mkdir ~/Scripts

Now make yourself the actual script which runs MoinMoin (this being the silly indirection - but it’s the only I can make it work…)


kwrite ~/Scripts/MoinMoin.sh

And put this in it


#!/bin/sh
python /home/nick/MoinMoin/wikiserver.py
read -n 1

The ‘read’ line at the end just makes it wait for a key, so if it doesn’t work you’ll be able to see why. And obviously I have no idea where you’ve installed MoinMoin… :wink:

Now make them executable


chmod +x ~/Desktop/Start.wikiserver
chmod +x ~/Scripts/MoinMoin.sh

(You might not actually need to do the first one - there was a big brouhaha about KDE and Gnome ignoring executable bits and running things anyway. No idea - but it certainly won’t cause any harm)

And it should work… Finally, use your web browser to navigate to your MoinMoin main page, and create yourself a bookmark. And if any kind soul reading this knows how to do this sensibly, that’d be appreciated too :stuck_out_tongue:

11

Also - worth noting, there’s one bug which annoyed the hell out of me. Basically, if you indent your text, whitespace goes funny - you can’t skip a line properly.

You can fix this easily enough - the solution I used was to edit the file [your MoinMoin directory]/MoinMoin/parser/text_moin_wiki.py (ain’t open source beautiful! ;))

Make a backup first. Search for the string “Handle pure indentation”, and it’ll take you to the broken function. Shortly following that string, you’ll find this line;

if not (self.in_li or self.in_dd):

Change it to;

if self.in_li or self.in_dd:

This does break graphical editing! So if you want to use graphical editing (I don’t know why you would… ;)), you have to find another way. From the looks of the page where I found the fix, it’s pretty easy - I just didn’t bother, because I only edit in text mode.

MoinMoinBugs/ParagraphBreaksBrokenWhenIndented - MoinMoin

12

Actually, just out of curiosity just tried the other ‘fix’, and I’m not convinced it works as well…

Personally, I’d just not use GUI mode and go for this one - text mode is faster anyway. Or just ignore the bug if it doesn’t bother you…

You may also find these useful…

Linux: How to remove old revisions in MoinMoin Wiki | le-Web.org

Comfortable wiki editing « Futurile

13

adsum01nl wrote:
> Hello is there any advice out there on running a personal wiki SW suite
> for Open Suse 11.2. My primary purpose is to run a personal knowledge
> management system. I am a very non-technical user. Also I am looking for
> something that is run locally on the computer as opposed to a web-based
> solution. Maybe in the longrun I would like to open up the personal wiki
> and collaborate with other selected users for certain pages. I see there
> is MediaWiki and Zim packages available already on YAST. I have tried to
> install both. Some observations about Zim, I havn’t experimented much
> with it but it seems to be not exactly what I am looking for as for.
> Will post an update when I give it a proper test. I also installed
> MediaWiki through YAST it seemed to download all the packages properly
> but I am unable to find the SW on my computer. Any suggestions would be
> greatly appreciated.

PmWiki http://www.pmwiki.org

It’s php based, very secure and very reliable and does not require
a backend db.

Large community of very motivated users/developers.

The few lines of installation on the PmWiki site is all you need.
Just follow what it says. Takes literally seconds to deploy.

We use PmWiki for our IT team’s intranet portal.

NTLUG’s website is also PmWiki based.

14

I’ve heard of a few ultra slim wikis - tiddlywiki is another one.

I like the fact in MoinMoin that I can use macros to do things like make show/hide buttons, or include sections of other pages - I presume that’s all impossible on anything much lighter. [edit - though looking at PMwiki’s feature set, it does look pretty powerful…]

Still - there are certainly a lot to choose from…

WikiMatrix - Compare them all